The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership: Legislative Action and the Future of Transatlantic Trade

Newton, Zachery
(2015)
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership: Legislative Action and the Future of Transatlantic Trade.
Undergraduate thesis,
under the direction of Joshua Hendrickson from
Economics,
University of Mississippi .

Abstract

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a controversial free trade agreement between the United States and the European Union, and is currently in negotiations as of the publication of this thesis. The TTIP seeks to remove both tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade (NTBs) between the EU and the US, such as environmental and food safety regulatory divergences. This paper seeks to predict the outcome of negotiations, while considering the various cultural, economic, and political factors that play into the potential success or failure of the TTIP.
To accomplish this, the paper takes a broad look at the historical and present contexts that have and still are shaping transatlantic trade, as well as seeking to understand the development of regulatory differences between the EU and the US. The TTIP is largely controversial because it threatens to alter standards that people in both the US and EU value, although concern in the EU is much greater in the US. Changes in agriculture policy, environmental, and production standards are likely if the agreement is to succeed. To make my predictions, collected voting data from the US Senate on three recent pieces of environmental legislation and regressed the data to determine what the largest influences on lawmaker voting behavior were, whether it be political ideology, party affiliation, region, bias, or first-term status. I found that political ideology was the most useful for determining how a senator would vote in every dataset.
Although the political environment could shift, as of now, the European Parliament supports the TTIP. Given a few assumptions about the proceedings, I predicted that the US would make the necessary concessions to achieve an agreement.